


War and Wine

by rosegreydreams



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, some murdering is done, warlord!arthur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 06:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16827229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosegreydreams/pseuds/rosegreydreams
Summary: Arthur intrigues her, with his bright eyes and his soft lips that shouldn’t fit a murderer, but somehow do.Does Guenevere want to kiss those lips?She doesn’t know yet.(Her uncertainty is itself a warning, but she doesn’t know that yet, either.)





	War and Wine

**Author's Note:**

> They like to pretend Arthur wasn't always a warlord at heart. But Guenevere loves him—she knows, she _knows_ she shouldn't, but she loves him, bloody, brutal glory and all.

He is golden. He is tawny skin and long legs and hair the color of wheat in the late summer sun, and a nose ever-so-crooked, and blue eyes of the churning winter sea. He is the young bear, the roaring lion, the avenging dragon, and he makes war as he makes love—with a smile upon his lips. He is a god, laughing with light in his eyes as he swings his blade to fell another enemy, the spray specking his armour with rich, sticky red. He is beautiful in the most monstrous of ways, as he cleans the blood off his sword, when the victory is captured and the moon rises high above the field of wasted and bitterly mortal dead men.

He is so many things, but there is one thing he is not.

He is not Guenevere’s.

The boy belongs to Britain. Belongs to the rolling hills, to the stone castles, to the fickle waters that surround the island, to the sword he drew from an anvil on a plain summer’s day, to the knights and the horses that ride behind this chosen sword-bearer into battle. Guenevere is but one of many followers, and she is among the lucky few to know their miraculous leader, from sitting at her father’s side at the boy’s war council, but they are not friends. Not yet. She is a princess and she isn’t meant to even be in this war. And the boy king takes no companion but crows, the devourers of those he leaves in his wake as he wages war.

Guenevere has seen the boy behead a dozen men, and she has seen him spill intestines like marbles on a stone gameboard, the same mildly bored, not-quite-euphoric expression dancing at his features as he takes life, again and again. Guenevere knows she should be afraid. Any sane person would fear him, a boy of mere sixteen years of age who, by now, has surely killed thrice the men than moons he has lived, but there is something about this monster, this demigod of death, that draws her in.

Arthur Pendragon. Boy king. Chosen king. War king. Once and future king. King, king, king, and Guenevere is only a girl on the wrong side of the island, living through a war she doesn’t quite understand yet. She would have left by now if she could; it might be safer, after all, back home in Cameliard behind castle walls and away from the fight, but she has a fascination with Arthur than she cannot shake. If it takes living through a war—watching everyone she knows cut flesh open time and time again on Saxon blades through the weak spots in their armour—to get the chance to know the king, then through a war she will live.

Guenevere wants to know Arthur. She wants to understand why the boy can kill without the coldness that chokes at Guenevere’s lungs and the pain that prickles at her eyes, not quite forming tears, but almost, when she watches a man strike his spear through another. Arthur intrigues her, with his bright eyes and his soft lips that shouldn’t fit a murderer, but somehow do.

Does Guenevere want to kiss those lips?

She doesn’t know yet.

(Her uncertainty is itself a warning, but she doesn’t know that yet, either.)

One day a Saxon lord is captured and brought before the boy king, brought before the Briton army to be made example of. He is responsible for the pillaging of half a dozen fishing villages along the southern coast, and for the raping of a hundred women and the murder of a hundred babies. It is that day when Guenevere understands the difference between her and Arthur— Guenevere, when her heart drives her to anger, will rage with the heat and ferocity of fire, as is trait of her bloodline before her. But Arthur—the young Pendragon is wiser than that, and ruled by his head.

His anger is that of the river, never once changing face or betraying his emotions, but made of currents that will drag men down, down, down, and drown them. His anger is that of the mountain, plain and unmoving but made of stone that buries its victims with impossible speed, and leave no trace of its fury. His anger cannot be seen on his blank face, but only in the slash of his sword.

Guenevere braces herself, preparing herself to see the head fall, cut from its neck, and the red to stream from the stump. But Arthur’s cut instead slices the man from chin to groin, and the Saxon’s eyes go white. He screams. The sound viciously grates at Guenevere’s ears, and she wishes for a moment she were deaf, so as not to hear the sheer animal pain that spills from the dying man’s mouth.

Arthur smiles a grim smile as he pushes the man to the dirt. He rolls his sleeves up past his elbows and drops his blade. It clangs as it hits the earth next to the Saxon. Guenevere finds she cannot look away, even as bile rises in her throat, threatening her to vomit. But she watches still, as Arthur draws the howling man’s flesh apart, as he cracks his ribcage open and yanks out his heart.

The red cakes his forearms like mud on a horse’s legs after the end of a long day’s ride, but the boy king shows no sign of discomfort. He ignores the steady bubbling of blood from the dead man’s ruined chest. He makes no motion to clean himself, either, and his voice is calm as he calls for a messenger.

Arthur tears a strip of cloth from the Saxon’s tunic, bundles the heart up inside it, and bids the messenger deliver it to its owner’s sons. There is not the slightest waver in his voice as he orders the Saxon to be burned, and his severed head to be tarred and piked at Londinium’s walls. There is nothing but determination as he makes the orders to move on, to continue on their way, and vows there shall be no rest until the last of the barbarian hordes are driven from Britain’s shores.

Guenevere should be afraid. She’s watched a man be so brutally executed, even the kings at the executioner’s side can’t help but turn away from the sight. It makes all sense, that she should fear this dragon boy and his always-bared claws. But Guenevere, try as she might, can’t find that fear within herself.

She wonders if her own heart is so small, barely the size of one of the sweet apples from Avalon, soft and just as easily crushed.

She wonders how that can be, that something so small might drive an entire body.

She wonders how something so delicate might hold an emotion as destructive as love.

She wonders how it might hurt, how her nerves might be turned to fire, should her king ever decide to slice her open, to pull out that apple-sized heart like he did the Saxon murderer.

She realizes her heart belongs to Arthur anyway.

It hurts to know.

(It is a good kind of hurt.)

The war ends fast after that. Guenevere stands behind her father as Arthur thanks him, still the only girl on the field for miles around. She stuck it through. She didn’t think she would make it to the end of the war before finally running away home, but she did.

“Thank you for your service, your men, and your courage,” Arthur says to Leodegranz.

To Guenevere, he asks, “Are you all right?” He is quiet, uncertain, and there is nothing at all of the king in his voice. “It is brave of you to have stayed at your father’s side for this long year.”

“Why, because I am a woman?” She feels the words spill dryly from her mouth before she can stop them, and her father glares at her. She has forgotten her lessons and her place; she is insolent, for speaking back to the king—

But he laughs, throws back his head and honest-to-goodness laughs, not at her, but with her, and at himself. He laughs for a long moment, and Guenevere stands still, unsure of what to do, when he finally replies with a smiled, “It is brave for anyone to watch men die, my lady. But to keep one’s jesting wit about her even through a war is an extraordinary feat.”

Guenevere studies Arthur’s mouth, unsure how to respond, and wondering if it might taste of wine. She imagines herself pressing their lips together, her fingers twisting in the king’s golden hair and Arthur’s rough hands cupping the back of her neck as they crash, crash, crash against each other. Waves onto shore, a felled hart against the earth, two seventeen-year-olds desperately trying to find purpose after the war they’ve spent a year fighting finally came to an end. They are a king and a princess and they will drink the finest of wines; reds the color of the autumn woods they’ve ridden through and the banners of Guenevere’s father’s men, whites clear like Arthur’s mirror-shine sword and cold like the winter of his homeland.

“It gladdens me to hear you laugh, sire,” she says.

“Aye, and I haven’t laughed in far too long,” he says. “So I thank you for that. What is your name?” 

“It is Guenevere, my lord,” she answers.

Arthur tests the name, slowly, and she wonders if perhaps he likes the taste of it on his tongue. “Guenevere,” he says, “a beautiful name for a beautiful girl.” He smiles again at her, white-toothed and brilliant, and Guenevere loses herself in it.

No, Arthur himself is the wine. Guenevere's tolerance for alcohol, she had learned from experience, is weak. The king’s words in his low northern brogue are intoxicating, and the mischievous sparkle in his eyes make Guenevere’s head spin around on itself, until she doesn’t know up from down, right from wrong. It must be wrong to love her king like this, with a weight that pushes her lungs to breathlessness and her heart to pained, rapid beating, and that makes her head spin faster, but it still feels so, so _right_.

She prays that Arthur reads nothing from this prolonged stare. That he can’t see the unmasked  _ want _ in Guenevere’s eyes, the slight open of the mouth that is barely restrained from reaching Arthur and kissing him like the stars are burning out and they will both die on the sword blades of their enemies tomorrow.

Well, Guenevere might die. She might die any day now, drunk on the heavy wine that is her infatuation for the king, the wine that is the king himself. Guenevere is drunk and she is falling, she can’t see clearly and her feet are collapsing underneath her, and it is all she can do to finally look away from Arthur, put the last goblet down.

She is intoxicated to the edge of consciousness, and her heart pained and beating hard enough to tear itself apart—

(She might never be sober again.)

**Author's Note:**

> dont @ me cos historical accuracy? accepted-canon-based accuracy? i dont know her
> 
> anyways this ones for my bastard thomas malory as a thanks for having an excellent hobby while locked away in prison, we couldnt have done this without you buddy


End file.
